The Exchanges

Q No, absolutely. It seems so much easier to insert that kind of culture and discipline from day one. I promise this isn't a Lightspeed advert though, but I did speak to Nackal before the show, and he said then, with that in mind and the benefits you just posited, what are the key aspects to making remote teams successful?

A So there's many aspects here. I think first, market selection is key. So understanding where you want to take your team and the right place for that team to grow. And there's a lot of factors that go into that In terms of talent, how big is the talent pool? Who are the incumbents in the market with large engineering teams? What technologies are popular in that city or that region? What universities are local there that could feed into the long-term potential talent pool? How aligned are time zones? How easy is travel? So there's a lot from overall market selection, but from a team standpoint, there's no question that you need strong initial leadership for that team to be successful. So hiring the first senior tech lead is critical. It doesn't have to be the First hire, but I think it does need to be in the first few to establish a strong foundation for that team and allow that lead to start making some of the hiring decisions with local knowledge of talent on the ground. And lastly, and I think a very important factor is making that team feel like first class citizens. And this really stems from giving complete product ownership to that team and not just thinking that they'll fix bugs or work on lower priority items. And doing that early on gives that team I think a vote of confidence from headquarters that they're equal contributors, which is very important in establishing tru…

AI assessment note: “I think first, market selection is key... you need strong initial leadership”

Q Well, I promise I'll pay you in Bitcoin later for that, but I do want to start today with your story, and how did you come to co-found what I believe will be a leader in distributed engineering teams with Terminal? What was that aha moment?

A Sure thing, and there were a lot of people involved, and timing was so important to make this happen, so quick background on me leading up to Terminal. In 2009, I was in college at the University of Pennsylvania and actually trying to get my own startup off the ground when I was introduced to Kevin Hartz through a close friend and mentor of mine, and after a brief conversation with him, I got really excited about what he was doing with Eventbrite and the opportunity to work with Kevin, so I abandoned my idea at the time and committed to joining Eventbrite after graduation. And I joined when there was about 30 people and ended up staying for seven years while the company grew to hundreds and hundreds of employees. And during my last few years, I worked in product where I led the platform team. As we scaled the company, there was this continuous demand for great engineering talent. So we took on a remote development strategy and ended up acquiring and then building it upon a team based in Mendoza, Argentina. And this is where I saw firsthand the power of having access to talent in a market Far outside the valley like Mendoza, which just has incredible engineers. And we were able to scale that team to around a hundred super fast. And I saw this as a critical competitive advantage for Eventbrite. And so I wondered why more companies weren't thinking outside the valley to scale thei…

AI assessment note: “And this is where I saw firsthand the power of having access to talent”

Q Well, I promise I'll pay you in Bitcoin later for that, but I do want to start today with your story, and how did you come to co-found what I believe will be a leader in distributed engineering teams with Terminal? What was that aha moment?

A Sure thing, and there were a lot of people involved, and timing was so important to make this happen, so quick background on me leading up to Terminal. In 2009, I was in college at the University of Pennsylvania and actually trying to get my own startup off the ground when I was introduced to Kevin Hartz through a close friend and mentor of mine, and after a brief conversation with him, I got really excited about what he was doing with Eventbrite and the opportunity to work with Kevin, so I abandoned my idea at the time and committed to joining Eventbrite after graduation. And I joined when there was about 30 people and ended up staying for seven years while the company grew to hundreds and hundreds of employees. And during my last few years, I worked in product where I led the platform team. As we scaled the company, there was this continuous demand for great engineering talent. So we took on a remote development strategy and ended up acquiring and then building it upon a team based in Mendoza, Argentina. And this is where I saw firsthand the power of having access to talent in a market Far outside the valley like Mendoza, which just has incredible engineers. And we were able to scale that team to around a hundred super fast. And I saw this as a critical competitive advantage for Eventbrite. And so I wondered why more companies weren't thinking outside the valley to scale thei…

AI assessment note: “And this is where I saw firsthand the power of having access to talent”

Q I'm so pleased you said about Kevin Hartz there. He mentioned a certain backflipping skill of yours, which we'll get into later, Dylan, have no fear, but I do want to discuss one thing that you said to me before with regards to kind of earlier careers. It's that many get their more formative years wrong in terms of prioritization. Can I ask Dylan, what did you mean by this?

A Absolutely. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make early in their career is leaving a company too soon. So I think early in your career, you should try to find a company and work there for at least four years. The average tenure in the Valley is about 18 months, and that's just such little time to actually learn what it takes to build a business. If I look at the best people I've worked with and many successful peers of mine and many founders I know, All of them have had at least one extended tour of duty with a company long enough to where you see the ups and downs, you see culture evolve, you see really hard problems solved that often take years, and so I kind of see this as really the modern MBA, and it follows advice that I received from a mentor of mine, Dave Potrick, who is the CEO of Charles Schwab for a number of years, and he told me after graduating that you've got to maximize experience over title and salary until your early thirties, and basically get an amazing foundation of a Experience to maximize what will ultimately be your highest grossing years. So if you want to be a VP of marketing or sales, you can stay linear and take the next pay and title when it's offered, but you might max out or cap out your value in that one discipline. But if you want to build a company or be a CEO, COO, I think you should focus on getting experience in different disciplin…

AI assessment note: “one of the biggest mistakes people make early in their career is leaving a company too soon”

Q No, absolutely. It seems so much easier to insert that kind of culture and discipline from day one. I promise this isn't a Lightspeed advert though, but I did speak to Nackal before the show, and he said then, with that in mind and the benefits you just posited, what are the key aspects to making remote teams successful?

A So there's many aspects here. I think first, market selection is key. So understanding where you want to take your team and the right place for that team to grow. And there's a lot of factors that go into that In terms of talent, how big is the talent pool? Who are the incumbents in the market with large engineering teams? What technologies are popular in that city or that region? What universities are local there that could feed into the long-term potential talent pool? How aligned are time zones? How easy is travel? So there's a lot from overall market selection, but from a team standpoint, there's no question that you need strong initial leadership for that team to be successful. So hiring the first senior tech lead is critical. It doesn't have to be the First hire, but I think it does need to be in the first few to establish a strong foundation for that team and allow that lead to start making some of the hiring decisions with local knowledge of talent on the ground. And lastly, and I think a very important factor is making that team feel like first class citizens. And this really stems from giving complete product ownership to that team and not just thinking that they'll fix bugs or work on lower priority items. And doing that early on gives that team I think a vote of confidence from headquarters that they're equal contributors, which is very important in establishing tru…

AI assessment note: “first, market selection is key... you need strong initial leadership... making that team feel like first class”

Q I'm so pleased you said about Kevin Hartz there. He mentioned a certain backflipping skill of yours, which we'll get into later, Dylan, have no fear, but I do want to discuss one thing that you said to me before with regards to kind of earlier careers. It's that many get their more formative years wrong in terms of prioritization. Can I ask Dylan, what did you mean by this?

A Absolutely. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make early in their career is leaving a company too soon. So I think early in your career, you should try to find a company and work there for at least four years. The average tenure in the Valley is about 18 months, and that's just such little time to actually learn what it takes to build a business. If I look at the best people I've worked with and many successful peers of mine and many founders I know, All of them have had at least one extended tour of duty with a company long enough to where you see the ups and downs, you see culture evolve, you see really hard problems solved that often take years, and so I kind of see this as really the modern MBA, and it follows advice that I received from a mentor of mine, Dave Potrick, who is the CEO of Charles Schwab for a number of years, and he told me after graduating that you've got to maximize experience over title and salary until your early thirties, and basically get an amazing foundation of a Experience to maximize what will ultimately be your highest grossing years. So if you want to be a VP of marketing or sales, you can stay linear and take the next pay and title when it's offered, but you might max out or cap out your value in that one discipline. But if you want to build a company or be a CEO, COO, I think you should focus on getting experience in different disciplin…

AI assessment note: “biggest mistakes people make early in their career is leaving a company too soon”

Q I mean, we mentioned also kind of the element of experts there from incumbents, and the benefits maybe of jacks of all trades at the earliest stages. Obviously, the experts come with much slower processes and decision-making being from the incumbents. How do you think about maybe then a startup leadership team's ability to really adapt and prioritize speed?

A I love this question, and I'm really lucky that one of my co-founders, Luke, is an ex-Navy SEAL team leader who's really influenced our team in terms of speed of decision making, especially in times of imperfect information. So this is probably the biggest area of my own development I've had to work on transitioning into founding terminal, but as a leadership team, we examine and scrutinize our decisions weekly, not just based on the outcomes of the decisions, but how quickly we were able to make those decisions and how could we speed up that process in the future I think that's really valuable time spent. There's actually a really good, I think, lesson from military history on this, which my co-founder Luke brought to my attention, which was there's this hotshot fighter pilot who could basically beat anyone in a dogfight in 40 seconds or less, and he used a framework called the OODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide, and act, and basically the idea is the faster you can go through that loop, the faster you can win, and the faster you make decisions and act, The faster the chessboard is now different, and your opponent needs to react to a whole new set of factors. So it's an interesting concept that's been well-adopted into military strategy, and I think could be emphasized more in early operating dynamics of leadership teams at startups.

AI assessment note: “as a leadership team, we examine and scrutinize our decisions weekly”

Q So if culture isn't the prohibitor then, Dylan, I'm getting rather confused. What are the commonalities and challenges that really keep you up at night when you think about establishing a remote office for an early-stage company? Are there commonalities?

A Absolutely. I think the main challenge that we see that is common across the board is when companies decide way too late that they need to find a new market to build their team. So they're at their wits end and basically throw this problem on the shoulders of engineering leadership to figure out. And while many CTOs and VPs of engineering have faced this problem in previous roles, the talent ecosystems around the world have changed so much, even over the last It's a whole new ballgame, and it forces that person who should be directing the technology vision for the product to focus on things like traveling back and forth to scope new markets and figuring out office space and negotiating internally with legal and HR to get the operations figured out, and so when you end up putting that into the engineering leadership and to juggle all of those different balls, that's definitely, I think, the biggest challenge and the commonality that we see when Companies are deciding to establish a remote team.

AI assessment note: “the main challenge that we see that is common across the board”

Q Yeah, I know. I love that transparency. But the common pushback I also get is the detrimental impact on culture for having distributed teams. But when we chatted before, and I love this quote, you said companies overvalue their culture. What makes you say this? And how do you think about culture across remote teams?

A Yes. And to clarify what I mean by that, it's that companies overvalue the culture they have today and undervalue the culture they can evolve into and create in the future. So this was a big lesson for me from Julia hearts at event, right? That culture should not be stagnant or overly preserved. It should evolve with the team that you build a real bottoms up approach. And as that relates to building remote teams, I think companies need to understand that as much as they want to just Export their culture to new markets. They really should be equally importing culture from that market into headquarters. I'm not sure who said it or coined the phrase, but I really like it. It's that culture is a verb, not a noun, and I think that's very much the spirit of what I believe in and what can ultimately build longer-term strength for a company with respect to culture.

AI assessment note: “companies overvalue the culture they have today and undervalue the culture they can evolve into”

Q So if culture isn't the prohibitor then, Dylan, I'm getting rather confused. What are the commonalities and challenges that really keep you up at night when you think about establishing a remote office for an early-stage company? Are there commonalities?

A Absolutely. I think the main challenge that we see that is common across the board is when companies decide way too late that they need to find a new market to build their team. So they're at their wits end and basically throw this problem on the shoulders of engineering leadership to figure out. And while many CTOs and VPs of engineering have faced this problem in previous roles, the talent ecosystems around the world have changed so much, even over the last It's a whole new ballgame, and it forces that person who should be directing the technology vision for the product to focus on things like traveling back and forth to scope new markets and figuring out office space and negotiating internally with legal and HR to get the operations figured out, and so when you end up putting that into the engineering leadership and to juggle all of those different balls, that's definitely, I think, the biggest challenge and the commonality that we see when Companies are deciding to establish a remote team.

AI assessment note: “the main challenge that we see that is common across the board is”

Q I did also speak to many of your investors before the show, and a commonality was your thesis around building these geographically diversified teams at such an early stage. So building remote teams early slightly contradicts maybe the conventional wisdom of kind of Scaling geographically. So why do you think that companies should geographically diversify maybe earlier in their growth?

A Absolutely. Great question. So I think simply building a company in one market like Silicon Valley is harder than ever before to sustain. In fact, I think it's unsustainable for 99% of the companies out there. Talent is obviously the most precious resource for a technology company and being isolated in one market actually poses massive long term risks. To a company's ability to compete, especially with high attrition rates of employees or the risk of a new overnight unicorn that can take up significant portion of the talent from the ecosystem. So we believe geographically diversifying or building teams across multiple markets is a muscle memory that you should start building much earlier than conventional wisdom would suggest. And we're seeing companies now do that on day one or with employee number one. And I think that Trend will only continue to be the norm, and we've spoken to companies that wait to do this much later when they have 50, 80, a hundred engineers, and that's much more difficult to actually re-engineer your practices and divisions of responsibility, or you now have a dated tech stack that makes it increasingly hard to find engineers that are actually excited to build upon the technologies you're using that may just be a few years behind the modern trend.

AI assessment note: “building teams across multiple markets is a muscle memory that you should start building much earlier”

Q In terms of this kind of heavy focus on product perfect and really getting that right time, you just raised a phenomenal round from many friends and guests of the show, including our wonderful advert for this show, Lightspeed Kleiner, David Sachs, just to name a few. I'm intrigued then. When's the right time to go out and raise venture funding and really accept Those growth expectations. Do you think?

A So I think that really comes down to the type of business you're pursuing and what signals you agree on with your investors are the right ones to indicate you're ready. So where some startups get it wrong is that funding is a process that you just start and finish. And I think it should be a series of ongoing conversations with various VCs to get their perspectives. And that can happen very early. We actually did this basically on day one. Before we were ever ready to take a check, just to learn how the market would perceive the data and metrics we were tracking, and it was super helpful, and we're continuing to do this now, even though we did just announce a round, so I appreciate it. We're excited about the investors we have on board.

AI assessment note: “comes down to the type of business you're pursuing and what signals you agree on”

Q if we start with something that Jason Lemkin always says to me, being for an early stage startup, you'll never be able to afford the expert from the incumbent. So you have to hire the stretch or the burnt out VP. First, would you agree with this? And second, how do you think about that balance of kind of hiring for experts versus jacks of all trades in early stage?

A So I'm a firm believer in hiring for the problem set that you're facing now and not getting caught up Too much in the longterm thinking about how this person will work out when the company is double or triple the size. And that's exactly why I think early stage, you want to hire more jacks of all trades and less experts from incumbents. So as a company, you don't want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. But with early stage employees, I actually think that those who are less expert, but exhibit more interdisciplinary skills can show a higher upper cap on their learning and adaptability. And those are the people that I think can be most successful And actually scale their learning in line with the growth of the company.

AI assessment note: “you want to hire more jacks of all trades and less experts from incumbents”

Q I mean, we mentioned also kind of the element of experts there from incumbents, and the benefits maybe of jacks of all trades at the earliest stages. Obviously, the experts come with much slower processes and decision-making being from the incumbents. How do you think about maybe then a startup leadership team's ability to really adapt and prioritize speed?

A I love this question, and I'm really lucky that one of my co-founders, Luke, is an ex-Navy SEAL team leader who's really influenced our team in terms of speed of decision making, especially in times of imperfect information. So this is probably the biggest area of my own development I've had to work on transitioning into founding terminal, but as a leadership team, we examine and scrutinize our decisions weekly, not just based on the outcomes of the decisions, but how quickly we were able to make those decisions and how could we speed up that process in the future I think that's really valuable time spent. There's actually a really good, I think, lesson from military history on this, which my co-founder Luke brought to my attention, which was there's this hotshot fighter pilot who could basically beat anyone in a dogfight in 40 seconds or less, and he used a framework called the OODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide, and act, and basically the idea is the faster you can go through that loop, the faster you can win, and the faster you make decisions and act, The faster the chessboard is now different, and your opponent needs to react to a whole new set of factors. So it's an interesting concept that's been well-adopted into military strategy, and I think could be emphasized more in early operating dynamics of leadership teams at startups.

AI assessment note: “we examine and scrutinize our decisions weekly, not just based on the outcomes of the decisions, but how quickly”

Q Can I ask, I'm probably the biggest nerd on decision-making. Truly, it's probably one of the main reasons I'm so single. But the question around that is, what does the framework look like to review decision-making, its effect Effectiveness. And you said that kind of about the weekly meetings to discuss this. What does that assessment really look like? Is it a right and wrong?

A So not a right and wrong. I think that again, you want to separate what were the outcomes of the decision and then how is the decision made? And oftentimes it comes down to ownership and being able to provide the team both at the leadership level and then at the individual contributor level, ownership to make the decisions and making that expressively clear is Is super important. So when we go back on a weekly basis and look at some of those decisions, we're trying to separate outcomes from process and then speed up the process or clarify ownership across the team to make those decisions happen faster. And that's exceptionally important when you have a distributed team, because we're not there to walk up and sometimes ask, Hey, should we do this or do that? And so division of ownership and making that super Clear up and down the ranks is exceptionally important, and that's what we look to examine weekly.

AI assessment note: “So not a right and wrong. I think that again, you want to separate what”

Q Another core challenge, though, that we did discuss before as well, it's actually kind of very interesting, as you said, from more a meta perspective, is that distributed teams is more of a philosophical hurdle than a practical hurdle. I mean, what does that really mean, and how do you often see this embodied?

A Absolutely. So philosophically, we hear that companies know they will need a remote team at some point, but think that they're just not quite ready or not quite set up to make it successful. Yet we're at this exciting time, as I said, where all of these technologies are now available, enabling remote teams to, I think, be more successful today than obviously ever before. And so I think a lot of these companies have actually adopted these technologies and practices without even realizing it. To get over that mental hurdle, if you will, one way is actually to, I think, ask a small team of your engineers to work from home for a few days or a week. And document what was challenging, and then grade their relative productivity. And I've actually seen variations of this done a few times, and often those teams realize they're actually already doing what they need to support remote. They're communicating and documenting in Slack and Jira, using video conferencing effectively. They're able to access all the resources they need in the cloud. So I think taking a step back and really evaluating actually what you need from a team perspective, From a process and a tools perspective can get you over the mental hurdle because it's most likely all there in front of you.

AI assessment note: “philosophically, we hear that companies know they will need a remote team at some point”

Q Yeah, I know. I love that transparency. But the common pushback I also get is the detrimental impact on culture for having distributed teams. But when we chatted before, and I love this quote, you said companies overvalue their culture. What makes you say this? And how do you think about culture across remote teams?

A Yes. And to clarify what I mean by that, it's that companies overvalue the culture they have today and undervalue the culture they can evolve into and create in the future. So this was a big lesson for me from Julia hearts at event, right? That culture should not be stagnant or overly preserved. It should evolve with the team that you build a real bottoms up approach. And as that relates to building remote teams, I think companies need to understand that as much as they want to just Export their culture to new markets. They really should be equally importing culture from that market into headquarters. I'm not sure who said it or coined the phrase, but I really like it. It's that culture is a verb, not a noun, and I think that's very much the spirit of what I believe in and what can ultimately build longer-term strength for a company with respect to culture.

AI assessment note: “companies overvalue the culture they have today and undervalue the culture they can evolve”

Q Another core challenge, though, that we did discuss before as well, it's actually kind of very interesting, as you said, from more a meta perspective, is that distributed teams is more of a philosophical hurdle than a practical hurdle. I mean, what does that really mean, and how do you often see this embodied?

A Absolutely. So philosophically, we hear that companies know they will need a remote team at some point, but think that they're just not quite ready or not quite set up to make it successful. Yet we're at this exciting time, as I said, where all of these technologies are now available, enabling remote teams to, I think, be more successful today than obviously ever before. And so I think a lot of these companies have actually adopted these technologies and practices without even realizing it. To get over that mental hurdle, if you will, one way is actually to, I think, ask a small team of your engineers to work from home for a few days or a week. And document what was challenging, and then grade their relative productivity. And I've actually seen variations of this done a few times, and often those teams realize they're actually already doing what they need to support remote. They're communicating and documenting in Slack and Jira, using video conferencing effectively. They're able to access all the resources they need in the cloud. So I think taking a step back and really evaluating actually what you need from a team perspective, From a process and a tools perspective can get you over the mental hurdle because it's most likely all there in front of you.

AI assessment note: “philosophically, we hear that companies know they will need a remote team at some point”

Q Can I ask, I'm probably the biggest nerd on decision-making. Truly, it's probably one of the main reasons I'm so single. But the question around that is, what does the framework look like to review decision-making, its effect Effectiveness. And you said that kind of about the weekly meetings to discuss this. What does that assessment really look like? Is it a right and wrong?

A So not a right and wrong. I think that again, you want to separate what were the outcomes of the decision and then how is the decision made? And oftentimes it comes down to ownership and being able to provide the team both at the leadership level and then at the individual contributor level, ownership to make the decisions and making that expressively clear is Is super important. So when we go back on a weekly basis and look at some of those decisions, we're trying to separate outcomes from process and then speed up the process or clarify ownership across the team to make those decisions happen faster. And that's exceptionally important when you have a distributed team, because we're not there to walk up and sometimes ask, Hey, should we do this or do that? And so division of ownership and making that super Clear up and down the ranks is exceptionally important, and that's what we look to examine weekly.

AI assessment note: “So not a right and wrong. I think that again, you want to separate”

Q I did also speak to many of your investors before the show, and a commonality was your thesis around building these geographically diversified teams at such an early stage. So building remote teams early slightly contradicts maybe the conventional wisdom of kind of Scaling geographically. So why do you think that companies should geographically diversify maybe earlier in their growth?

A Absolutely. Great question. So I think simply building a company in one market like Silicon Valley is harder than ever before to sustain. In fact, I think it's unsustainable for 99% of the companies out there. Talent is obviously the most precious resource for a technology company and being isolated in one market actually poses massive long term risks. To a company's ability to compete, especially with high attrition rates of employees or the risk of a new overnight unicorn that can take up significant portion of the talent from the ecosystem. So we believe geographically diversifying or building teams across multiple markets is a muscle memory that you should start building much earlier than conventional wisdom would suggest. And we're seeing companies now do that on day one or with employee number one. And I think that Trend will only continue to be the norm, and we've spoken to companies that wait to do this much later when they have 50, 80, a hundred engineers, and that's much more difficult to actually re-engineer your practices and divisions of responsibility, or you now have a dated tech stack that makes it increasingly hard to find engineers that are actually excited to build upon the technologies you're using that may just be a few years behind the modern trend.

AI assessment note: “being isolated in one market actually poses massive long term risks”

Q Before we discuss kind of the conventional problems that are often associated, one for me that I always get concerned by is just seamless lines of communication. What have been your learnings on ensuring kind of seamless communication flows between distributed teams?

A So one of the, I think, most important factors is time zone alignment. I think what we've heard from feedback is the more hours that you have to To synchronously communicate, whether that's over Slack or other tools and systems, that's one of the most important factors. And then obviously, I think that we're at this stage in time where a lot of those technologies are just being adopted, whether it's in your core office in San Francisco, or when you're making a concerted effort to establish new channels and new pathways. The other thing I think most companies need to change is just over-documenting Or increasing the documentation that they have of decisions that are being made at various meetings and points, and having a repository where someone could look back and see the timeline of those decisions. Those are really helpful.

AI assessment note: “one of the, I think, most important factors is time zone alignment.”

Q if we start with something that Jason Lemkin always says to me, being for an early stage startup, you'll never be able to afford the expert from the incumbent. So you have to hire the stretch or the burnt out VP. First, would you agree with this? And second, how do you think about that balance of kind of hiring for experts versus jacks of all trades in early stage?

A So I'm a firm believer in hiring for the problem set that you're facing now and not getting caught up Too much in the longterm thinking about how this person will work out when the company is double or triple the size. And that's exactly why I think early stage, you want to hire more jacks of all trades and less experts from incumbents. So as a company, you don't want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. But with early stage employees, I actually think that those who are less expert, but exhibit more interdisciplinary skills can show a higher upper cap on their learning and adaptability. And those are the people that I think can be most successful And actually scale their learning in line with the growth of the company.

AI assessment note: “early stage, you want to hire more jacks of all trades and less experts”

Q Before we discuss kind of the conventional problems that are often associated, one for me that I always get concerned by is just seamless lines of communication. What have been your learnings on ensuring kind of seamless communication flows between distributed teams?

A So one of the, I think, most important factors is time zone alignment. I think what we've heard from feedback is the more hours that you have to To synchronously communicate, whether that's over Slack or other tools and systems, that's one of the most important factors. And then obviously, I think that we're at this stage in time where a lot of those technologies are just being adopted, whether it's in your core office in San Francisco, or when you're making a concerted effort to establish new channels and new pathways. The other thing I think most companies need to change is just over-documenting Or increasing the documentation that they have of decisions that are being made at various meetings and points, and having a repository where someone could look back and see the timeline of those decisions. Those are really helpful.

AI assessment note: “one of the, I think, most important factors is time zone alignment.”

Q In terms of this kind of heavy focus on product perfect and really getting that right time, you just raised a phenomenal round from many friends and guests of the show, including our wonderful advert for this show, Lightspeed Kleiner, David Sachs, just to name a few. I'm intrigued then. When's the right time to go out and raise venture funding and really accept Those growth expectations. Do you think?

A So I think that really comes down to the type of business you're pursuing and what signals you agree on with your investors are the right ones to indicate you're ready. So where some startups get it wrong is that funding is a process that you just start and finish. And I think it should be a series of ongoing conversations with various VCs to get their perspectives. And that can happen very early. We actually did this basically on day one. Before we were ever ready to take a check, just to learn how the market would perceive the data and metrics we were tracking, and it was super helpful, and we're continuing to do this now, even though we did just announce a round, so I appreciate it. We're excited about the investors we have on board.

AI assessment note: “comes down to the type of business you're pursuing and what signals you agree on”